This week I was intending to blog about the new DVD and Blu-ray re-issue of Peter Jackson's early masterpiece Heavenly Creatures, featuring the sensational debut of the 19-year-old Kate Winslet and the no less outstanding Melanie Lynskey. Before that, though, I have to revisit Nicolas Winding Refn's new film Drive, starring Ryan Gosling as an ice-cool getaway driver.

It's time for a mea culpa, and a slice of what I can only describe as contrition quiche. Fans of this film were very far from happy with my three-star review and complained about my tiresome observations on the subject of the Driver's "five-minute rule", which they said were an toxic combination of pedantry and inaccuracy. They were entirely right to complain. I had simply got it flat-out wrong – and for this I apologise. The "five-minute" rule was for the driver's wait time, not his drive time as I stated; my misapprehension was that the five-minute window extended to the getaway escape, but I had just stupidly got hold of the wrong end of the stick. However, I should say that, for what it's worth, I don't honestly think that this made any difference to my overall opinion: for me, it is disconcerting and unengaging that the movie turns out to be less about super-stylish driving and more about super-stylish violence. But that's by the way; there's no doubt that I made a bone-headed factual error. Again: my apologies.

So anyway… what a joy to watch again Peter Jackson's masterly, formally daring, and superbly acted drama Heavenly Creatures, his 1994 movie about the true story of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand who formed an obsessive relationship which spiralled scarily out of control.

Kate Winslet's performance is brilliant: her face is almost hyper-real, like a wide-eyed, full-lipped animation of wit, mischief, sensuality, and then dark hostility. As her career progressed, Winslet became more mature, less showy and more subtle – though always a very demonstrative actor, her latest triumph being of course the lead performance in Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce, for which she has been awarded an Emmy. In some ways, however, I think that this very first screen performance, her Juliet, is the most purely seductive and the funniest of her screen portrayals. Melanie Lynskey is no less outstanding in a less glamorous role. Their relationship is tender, erotic, conspiratorial, with a siege mentality: it's Juliet and Pauline against the world. The pair are rather like a bifurcated version of the teenage Angelica Deverell, the heroine of Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 novel Angel.

And Jackson manages a disturbing and sublime coup de cinéma with the sudden departure into the girls' dysfunctional CGI wonderland of Borovnia, that special imagined place they can only access at heightened moments of ecstasy, or rage, or sexual pleasure. It showed Jackson's gift for fantasy landscapes – here with the subversive suggestion that these are the product of emotional damage.

However, I can't help also remembering that Heavenly Creatures has a special chapter in the history of British journalism and film criticism. At the time of its release, Julie Burchill was the film critic of the Sunday Times, and she wrote a superb review of this film, which can be accessed online here. Burchill unimprovably describes Winslet's Juliet as "a classically beautiful English rose slowly choking on the thorns of her craziness" with the "manic dazzle where madness and glamour meet", and has some shrewd things to say about how Peter Jackson got it right with this movie, which might have come out wrong were it entrusted to, say, David Lynch or John Waters. I wonder how Guillermo del Toro would have directed it.

But Burchill's critical history of Heavenly Creatures does not end there. In later writings, she described the way her sensational affair with journalist Charlotte Raven – which had at the time had all media London gabbling with excitement – took flight at around the same time as seeing this film. (Charlotte Raven herself wrote a cinema column for the New Statesman)

The affair was very possibly partly inspired by seeing Heavenly Creatures. I like to think that it was, in some gloriously liberated sense, an inspired act of criticism itself: a passionate, flesh-and-blood, real-life response to Jackson's film. While the rest of us journalists are scratching out our dry monochrome thoughts to this and other films or books or TV shows, Charlotte and Julie were living it for real in rich emotional Technicolor. It's great to see Heavenly Creatures come out again. I would have liked to see Burchill's review included in the special features.